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  POWDER BURN

  Copyright © 2018 by Blake Banner

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

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  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  ALSO BY BLAKE BANNER

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  ONE

  I was in New York, in my apartment on Riverside Drive. Outside, the birds in the gardens along the river were going crazy because the sun was rising over the Canyons of Steel, and their brains were too small to remember that that happened every day. I was leaning on the kitchen doorjamb, drinking coffee and looking at the TV. There was a French guy, François Troyes, talking about his company and what they did. At least, that was what they’d invited him on the show to talk about, but so far, I still didn’t know what his company did. All I knew was that he was crazy.

  “Megyn, you know? We ’ave to ask ourselves, what is the importance of the differences in the genetic coding of the different races on the planet. OK? Now, we know that there is, for example, very little difference between, for example, a fly and a ’uman being. So, the difference between a monkey, an ape, and a ’uman being is very very small. You and me, you know, Megyn, we are almost gorillas!” He laughed like he’d said something funny and Megyn laughed like he hadn’t. He didn’t care. He kept right on going. “So what we can see is that a very, very small difference in the genetic coding can make a very big difference in many things.” He held up both hands and looked theatrically alarmed. “No! You say to me, no! This is the ’ot potato. Do not touch this! Genetic differences in ’uman beings make the changes in appearance: blond ’air and blue eyes in the Germans, brown skin and curly ’air in the Africans, but it does not affect the emotions, the mind, the ’uman soul! This is racism! But believe me, Megyn, this potato is not so ’ot.”

  Megyn smiled liked she had trodden in something she really hadn’t wanted to tread in. “You are certainly sailing in very controversial waters, Mr. Troyes. How exactly does this relate to your company’s work?”

  He became suddenly intense. “Because the rejection of the SERESS Bill risks sending us to research in the Third World. Genetic differences, Megyn, make physical changes, but the biggest mistake that people ever made on this planet is to believe that emotions, they are not physical. But emotions, Megyn, emotions, they are purely and exclusively one ’undred percent physical! And this means that, with the smallest, half of a half of a percent alteration in the genetic coding, we can alter the emotional response to the environment. For this reasons we ’ave the French: emotional, fun-loving, artistic and sensual, and we ’ave the Scandinavians, practical, cerebral, methodical, emotionally disengaged from ’is environment…”

  I figured I was never going to find out what this sensual, fun-loving Frenchman’s company did. And if I wanted half-baked theories on eugenics, I’d have more fun drinking a beer with Len, the Aryan barman at the Golden Shamrock on W96th. He’d probably make more sense, too.

  Besides, I told myself as I drained my cup and grabbed my jacket, only women can get away with speaking with a French accent. It’s just one of those things, like wearing a bun. On men it’s stupid. Maybe it’s genetic encoding.

  I collected my Zombie from the parking garage, emerged into the early August heat of Bloomingdale, and headed north and east, toward Harlem. I had the windows open and eased back in my seat as I crawled through the stop and start morning traffic, letting my mind play over the text message I had received the day before. It had read simply, My sister Carmencita told me if I needed help to message you. I think they are trying to kill me. 12C E126 Harlem. Charlie.

  I’d spent a while wondering who the hell Carmencita was. I asked Abi, my new wife, and her kids, Sean and Primrose, but the name meant nothing to them. So then I asked Kenny, the butler I had inherited from my father, if the name meant anything to him or Rosalia, and he reminded me. Back in the days when I was trying to find Marni, I had helped a girl in Arizona, on the border with Mexico. She was owned and used by associates of the Sinaloa drugs cartel. I’d got her out, sent her to Boston, and told Kenny to look after her until she got on her feet[1]. It looked like I’d forgotten about her, but she hadn’t forgotten about me.

  I had tried calling the number, but it was dead. I figured it had been a burner. The only thing to do was to check out the address.

  I turned east into E125, then north for a block on Madison and finally made a left onto E126th. I was lucky to find a parking space in the dappled shade of a plane tree outside number 12. I killed the engine and climbed the eleven steps up the stoop to the big, stucco portal and the heavy wooden doors. There were four bells outside, for apartments A, B, C and D. B, C and D didn’t have names, but A had an ancient, faded card stuck beside the bell that said, Manager.

  I rang on C a few times and got no response, so I rang on A and after a minute, a voice called up to me from below the stoop. It was a woman’s voice and it said, “Hoozat?”

  I peered over the edge. She was anything between forty and a hundred and forty, almost spherical and roughly the color of a dumpling. She had short-sighted blue eyes that peered at me through the thick lenses of her heavy glasses. I smiled.

  “I’m looking for Charlie.”

  “He ain’t there.”

  “I know.”

  “Why you ringin’ on the bell then?”

  “Because I didn’t know when I started ringing. I only found out after. Do you know where he is?”

  “No.”

  I leaned on the edge with my elbows and, for some reason, asked, “How long have you not known where he was?”

  “Since he ain’t been there.”

  “And how long is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you did know, how long would it be?”

  “’Bout a week. Bit more.”

  “Do you own this house?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You got a number where I can call him?”

  “No.”

  Things were getting surreal and
I thought I’d better get onto a firmer footing. I trotted down the steps and entered through the gate to the small front yard outside the basement flat. “Mrs…?”

  “I’s the manager.”

  I nodded. “Mrs. Manager. I urgently need to contact Charlie. It could be a matter of life or death…”

  “His rent’s due next weekend. If he ain’t paid by Monday, he’s out.”

  “Could you let me into his apartment?”

  “You come back Monday, I’ll rent you the room.”

  “Mrs. Manager, do you understand what I have just said to you?”

  “If you come back Monday, I’ll rent you the room. Then you can go inside an’ have a look.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “He could be in real danger. I need to see him now.”

  She fixed me with expressionless eyes that seemed to bulge through her lenses. “I can tell you where he works.”

  “OK, that would be helpful.”

  We stood looking at each other for a good five seconds. When you are staring at somebody in silence and they are staring back, five seconds is a very long time. Finally I reached into my jacket and pulled out my wallet. I gave her twenty bucks and she said, “Across the river, corner of Park Avenue an’ E138th. On Line Clothing dot Com. He weren’t nothin’ but a packin’ boy, for all the airs he liked to give himself. What you want with him, anyways?”

  “Thanks for your help, Mrs. Manager.”

  I turned and made my way out of the gate. She called after me, “That ain’t my name, you know? Will I see you Monday?” As I climbed into the Zombie, she was leaning over the gate, shouting, “If he don’t pay the rent, you can tell him he’s out!”

  I pulled away and headed toward the Bronx. I crossed over the Madison Avenue Bridge and it took me directly to 138th. On Line Clothing wasn’t hard to find. It occupied a shabby, dirty-white two-story building on the corner of Park Avenue. It had two steel roller-blinds in the up position and a couple of vans parked inside what looked like loading bays.

  I did a ‘U’ and parked on the corner. Then I climbed out and pushed through a wooden door with glass panes in it that gave onto a small reception area. A girl sitting behind a cheap, fake-wood counter chewed gum at me and waited. I leaned on the counter and said, “I need to see whoever is in charge.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Somebody who needs to see whoever is in charge.”

  “That would be Sammy.” She said it like that might change my mind, then added. “He owns the place.”

  I asked her with my eyebrows what she was waiting for. She sighed, picked up an old-fashioned telephone and pressed some buttons. She was still chewing. While we waited I said, “You must have strong jaw muscles.”

  She looked at me but didn’t answer. She blew a big, pink bubble instead and said, “Sammy? Guy here wants to talk to you. He won’t tell me.”

  I mouthed, “It’s personal.”

  “He says it’s personal… OK.” She hung up. “He’ll be right down.”

  She picked up a magazine that had lots of pictures in it of people who could afford things that she couldn’t. I watched her chew and look at the photographs. After a moment I asked her, “Can you bite through bone with those jaws?”

  She didn’t look up. She just said, “Bite me.”

  A door opened and a man in his fifties came through it, frowning at me like he already knew I was wasting his time. He said, “Yuh?”

  Back in the day, when I was still searching for Marni, I had occasion once to borrow an ID card and badge from a Federal Special Agent called Maclean[2]. I had eventually had to return it, but I’d managed to make a good copy before I did. It’s a useful thing to have, and I like to keep it about my person, for situations when I think somebody is going to be too busy to talk to me. I pulled it out of my pocket now and showed it to him.

  “Is there somewhere where we can talk in private?”

  He sighed and pointed at the door he’d just come through. “Upstairs, in my office.”

  We climbed a narrow flight of stairs carpeted in a shade of gray that made a nice match for the peeling gray-green paint on the walls. We emerged at the top into a long room with two long, narrow tables in the middle. There were racks of clothes wrapped in plastic lined up against the walls and forming several aisles down the center. Amongst this dense undergrowth of steel racks and plastic-wrapped clothes, people moved, holding bags, boxes, and order forms, collecting clothes and wrapping them to fill mail orders.

  Sammy led me on a zigzag course through several of the aisles to a small office at one end of the room. He pushed through the door and fell into a chair behind a desk covered in drifts of paper. Among them, I could make out a phone and a laptop. I sat opposite him and he said, “I can give you ten minutes. I ain’t being uncooperative, but I got a business to run. You got your job, I got mine.”

  I tried to sound like I cared and said, “I appreciate your time, Mr…”

  “Sami.”

  “Sammy Sami?”

  He spread his hands.

  I went on. “You have an employee, one of your packers, his name is Charlie…”

  “Had.” He interrupted me. “Charlie Vazquez. I fired him.”

  “What happened?”

  He made a face of mild, justifiable outrage and shrugged. “You don’t show up to work, you don’t go no job! It’s the way it works. You show up to work, you get paid, fair an’ square. You don’t show up to work, you don’t got a job. Fair an’ square. Is that unreasonable?”

  “When did he last come in?”

  “What’s today?” He glanced at a calendar on his desk, half buried in paper. “Monday, 9th. Friday before last. He never showed Monday. If you find him, tell him he got fired.”

  “I’ll do that. What can you tell me about him? He have any friends here?”

  He tucked his chin in, mouth wide open, and looked at me like I was insane. “Naaah… You kidding me? College kid. Too good for these bums. Kept his distance.” He shrugged again. “Nice kid, my daughter goes to college, you know, polite, never a bad word, no attitude, do anything you asked him…” He nodded a lot. “Punctual. Punctual to a fault. I don’t think the kid ever slept, you know what I’m sayin’? We do shifts, we keep goin’ twenty-four seven. Whatever time you tell him to be here, he was here, wide awake. I never saw nothin’ like it. And smart. You never had to tell him nothin’ twice. Sharp. You know what I mean?” He shrugged. “Sorry to lose him.”

  “Where’d he go to college?”

  He gave me a skeptical leer. “I can tell you what he said. I don’t know if it’s true. He said he was studying biology at Columbia. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. He was smart, but what can I tell you? There are a lot of smart people who don’t go to Columbia, right?”

  I nodded, wondering what to make of what he was telling me. I frowned. “The last few times he came in to work. Did he seem troubled, nervous, unhappy in any way…”

  He shook his head. “Naah… He was like…” He laughed. “Like a fuckin’ Mexican jumpin’ bean. Zip! Zip! Zip! Pow! Pow! Pow! I tell him to do something: ‘OK Sammy!’ and he’s off! I tell him to do somethin’ else: ‘OK, Sammy!’ and he’s gone. Zip! Pow! And he’s done it. He was a damn good worker. The best. But hey, you don’t turn up, you don’t call. What can I do? This is a business, not a fuckin’ charity. Am I right?”

  I nodded. “Biology, huh?”

  “S’what he said.”

  “OK, I won’t take up any more of your time, Mr. Sami. Thanks for your help.”

  “Hey! Always happy to help the Feds. You guys do important work. Respect, man. You know the way out, right? If I can help any more, call.”

  I made my way through the maze of clothes racks and down the narrow staircase back into reception. Before stepping outside, I paused and leaned over the reception desk to look down at the Chewing Gum Monster. She raised her eyes from her magazine and chewed at me without expression. I smiled like I meant it and said, “Did anybody ever t
ell you you have a beautiful smile?”

  She studied me a moment, then gave her head a little up-and-down waggle. “Yah…”

  I winked and grinned. “They lied.”

  I stepped out into the glare of the late morning, August sunshine and stared up at the cloudless sky for a bit. Then I climbed behind the wheel of the Zombie and sat staring at the traffic grinding its way relentlessly over the unforgiving concrete. It was getting hot.

  I gently thumped the steering wheel with my fist. Nothing was making any sense. Nothing was making sense because I had nothing to make sense with. I had a text message from somebody who claimed to be ‘Charlie’, Carmencita’s brother, but I had no way of knowing for sure, unless I contacted her, and at this stage I did not want to do that. I figured Carmencita had been through enough for one lifetime. She didn’t need a scare like this, especially as it might turn out to be nothing. So I had his text message, and I had a kid called Charlie Vazquez, who was a great worker, and had disappeared over the weekend.

  A kid who claimed to be a biology student at Columbia.

  I sighed and shrugged. That much, at least, I could confirm.

  TWO

  I parked on Amsterdam Avenue and made my way into the Department of Biological Sciences via the pedestrian passageway that leads to the Fairchild Center. I found the student office, confirmed that Charles Vazquez of E 126th Street was a student there, and was directed to his tutor, Ken Chang, who was lecturing a class at that time, but would be finishing in the next ten minutes.

  I found the classroom and waited outside till the doors opened and all the bright, young things started spilling out. When they had begun to disperse, I shouldered my way into the echoing, empty amphitheatre. Ken Chang was standing at an ancient, wooden table, stuffing books and papers into an old leather satchel. He was in his mid thirties and had ‘Big IQ’ written all over his face. He glanced at me and summed me up as I approached him. By his expression, I figured he didn’t like what he made of me.

  “Can I help you?”

  I tried to smile amiably and said, “I hope so. I’m looking for Charlie Vazquez.”